Sep 17 Key Concepts for Creative Web Writing

How search engines can help you write better copy

The goal of good copy is to get site visitors to take action. Along the way, you may entertain and educate, but those are not ends in themselves. The goal is to lead customers to take action.

Concepts are the key to creatively writing content. As you prepare the content, think of the topics you want to cover within the page or article. Use concepts to

Free up your text from the constraints of keywords

Write in natural language addressing the concept of the page or article

Create a cluster of words that lead the reader and search engines to clearly understand what you say

Concepts help create relevant and meaningful content for websites. With algorithms for co-occurrence and phrase-based indexing, search finds the related words within each concept. As you build your text, the relevance, relationship, and context of your words work together to build a cluster of words that are recognized by search as related.

Peter Hatherley, the creator of CISE (Conceptual Intelligence Search Engine), calls them Key Concepts. They work with probabilistic topic models which discover the latent semantic structures within a text body. These topic models help to organize and understand large collections of text bodies. They help understand the overall concept and concepts inside your text.

Author and educator David Amerland explains the relationships in terms of data points.

When we mention "Big Data" 90% of the times people think "analytics" but Big Data has to do with relationships, or more precisely the uncovering of data point value fluctuations due to changing relational connections. This makes Big Data a tool that can be used proactively to make predictions and in real-time to change the client/service provider relationship by providing more information to the former and a more meaningful idea of what customers want for the latter.

When it comes to visualizing it, think of Big Data as a sea. No ripple in it leaves anyone unaffected. The magnitude of the ripple is in direct proportion to the power/impact of its source and the proximity of the observer. That means that everything is connected and there is a direct relationship amongst each and all of us which is not always apparent, until it is recognized. As Bruce Lee would have said had he known about Big Data "Read the ripples my friend" :)

Talk to Your Visitor

The technicalities the underly Key Concepts explain the principles. When creating text for website visitors the key is to write as though you were talking to your visitor face-to-face. On each page of a website you are entering a dialogue with your site visitor.

The “technicalities” may have brought them to the page, but the dialogue you enter by answering a question about a product or service in natural language. Language your site visitor and potential customer understands.

Web writer Teodora Petkova believes that dialogue is the key to engaging your potential customers. She feels that dialogue is more important than keyword research. Hear her comments in the video below.

Text As Answers

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent="yes" overflow="visible"][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type="1_1" background_position="left top" background_color="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" spacing="yes" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat" padding="" margin_top="0px" margin_bottom="0px" class="" id="" animation_type="" animation_speed="0.3" animation_direction="left" hide_on_mobile="no" center_content="no" min_height="none"][clickToTweet tweet="Think of each page as a landing page because it may be the first place your site visitor lands. " quote="Think of each page as a landing page because it may be the first place your site visitor lands. " theme="style5"]Write your content as though you are answering the question that brought that visitor to that specific page.

You are now in conversation (dialogue) with your site visitor. Introduce your product or service on a web page. Go deeper in a blog post that expands a core idea.

Conceptual creativity allows you to speak in your voice as if the visitor had walked into your office or store. Your text is concise and easy to understand.

Conceptual Creativity

Recently I was part of a panel discussing Key Concepts as presented by Peter Hatherley, the creator of CISE.

Further Study

In a recent Google+ post, Bill Slawski talks about the promise of topic models.

The ability to capture the association of documents with real-world entities or concepts holds great promise over traditional keyword-based approaches (cf. Google’s “knowledge graph”, which enhances search results by linking documents to entities1 ). In a similar vein, we argue that it is also highly desirable to build topic models that can capture the complex patterns involving the entities associated with documents. Almost any document is associated with some set of real-worlds entities. Bill Slawski, Go Fish Digital